2:38 AM:

The good news is that I got all the grading done. The bad news is that I finished shortly after 2 AM, and just got home a few minutes ago. I'd like to take a one-hour nap before my 5 AM cab ride to the airport, but (a) I'm afraid of sleeping right through my alarm and missing everything, and (b) I still need to pack.

I may need somebody to prop me up while I read my paper to the nice academics in the audience...

2:17 PM:

Oh, as for the matter at hand... it's like this: this is my final semester in the English program here. I still need to take one more course outside this program to fill the requirements for the Master's imposed by the grad school. If necessary, the relevant committee has voted to allow me to take that one additional course next semester, but they've also voted not to pay for it, so if 'twere done, it'd have to be on my own dime.

Recognizing, however, that I'm not exactly loaded, and that this would be a considerable expense, they're trying to do an end-run around the problem. One course I took last semester could have been taken through American Culture, rather than through English. They're trying to get a special exemption allowing them to retroactively change my registration, so I can turn out to have officially taken it through AC. If this works, it'll allow me to get my M.A. at the end of the semester with no further expense, and they can get me out of their hair, and everybody will be relatively happy. Just so long as they can convince a bureaucrat in the administration to go along with the idea. Stay tuned...

Quoth I, in the last entry:

I meet the chair of my grad program -- the one person in the department I have zero respect for, actually

Sometimes I wish I were the kind of person capable of maintaining a long-term grudge.

Once again, crossposted from TUS:

Ohhhhhkaaaaaay. Today's agenda:

• Get up, get dressed, try to eat something. I can already tell the last of those is gonna be a bit of a challenge, 'cause I got about two hours of sleep -- not by choice; I just couldn't manage any more than that -- and my body isn't exactly up to handling food or drink at the moment. But I'm gonna need some sort of fuel to make it through the day...
• Write up the lesson plans that were theoretically to have been written last night. The current draft is simply "don't suck," but something more specific than that would be a Good Thing.
• 11 AM-12 noon: The first of the two consecutive discussion sections I'll be teaching. Which will be observed by my Pedagogy professor, which I'm generally happy about, but it'd be nice if I were a bit more put together...
• 12 noon-1 PM: The second of the discussion sections, the one in which, with any luck, I avoid the mistakes I made the first time around. (The bright side here? We're doing Alice in Wonderland. Which has been helping get me through the week, it really has...)
• 1 PM-1:30 (?) PM: I meet the chair of my grad program -- the one person in the department I have zero respect for, actually -- to find out how they're going to get me out of the program at the end of this semester and still give me a master's degree. Or some variation on that theme.
• 1:30 PM or so: Try to finish the homework for my English Language class. Despite having spent a good chunk of last night working on this, it is not looking likely that I will have anything to show for it in time. I am very unhappy about that.
• 2:30-4:00 PM: Attend said English Language class. Hang head in shame.
• 4:00 PM: Photocopy some stuff for my Pedagogy homework.
• 4:15 PM: Meet Pedagogy prof., find out everything I did wrong a few hours earlier. Also, get advice, reality check, and reassurance. One hopes.
• 4:30 PM or so: Continue grading student papers. I've got forty of them this week, and I can't finish them on Thursday, as is my usual practice, because I'm boarding a cab to the airport at 5 AM tomorrow for a conference in Charlotte, NC. These need to get done today.
• 7:00 PM-8:00 PM: Meet with the other grad student instructors and professor of the course I'm leading discussions in.
• 8:00 PM-whenever: Finish grading papers, drop off at mailroom for other GSIs to return tomorrow. Finish Pedagogy homework, drop off at mailroom for prof.
• Whenever onward: Go home, pack for trip, finish abridging paper for 15-minute talk, print final draft on index cards, get a nap in before aforementioned cab ride.
• In the middle of all the above: Have lunch, perhaps. And e-mail students. And struggle to maintain both my consciousness and my composure.

12:52 PM:

Worst of all possible outcomes: I'm out of the program at the end of this semester, although they're apparently still figuring out how to deal with the fact that I won't actually have a Master's at that point. I'm supposed to be meeting with the program chair tomorrow (in between grading papers and packing for my conference the next morning) to discuss that little complication. Anyway, here's the official report:

Shmuel’s first year in the program was by all accounts, his own included, disastrous. Signs of trouble dominate all aspects of the record apart from the language requirement, which stands satisfied with Hebrew and French. His class participation was marked by numerous unaccountable absences. He displayed transparent indifference and even animosity toward the materials treated in several courses. He routinely sought extensions on his due dates (to the extent of taking an incomplete in 5 of his 8 courses). Notwithstanding such extensions, his papers evinced a middling to low quality. In no course did he demonstrate a careful engagement with any standing critical conversation or debate. Most of his final course grades are in the B range, and he earned an outright A in no course. To his credit, Shmuel impressed some of his teachers with the offbeat originality of his thinking. If he sometimes comes at things out of left field, he nonetheless seems thoughtful and critically energetic. A “serious and intelligent” student, allows one report. Another spells out his strongly “critical” spirit and compliments his talents for unorthodox forms of satirical exposition and parodic ventriloquy. But even that same report, like most others, expresses concern for the “continual note of disaffection” that marks both his critical voice and his collegial bearing. Roughly half of his professors credit a certain spark or energy in Shmuel’s thinking but remain deeply concerned that he resists harnessing this thinking to any established scholarly discussion. The remainder of his professors might better be characterized as astonished or provoked by his bearing in class. In his written and verbal self-reporting to the Committee, Shmuel admits many elements of this picture and regrets those points. He invites consideration of several circumstances bearing on this first year’s performance. Raised in New York City, he was somewhat more immediately affected than most of his peers were by the September 11 terrorist attacks. His religious obligations during the Jewish high holidays of that same month required him, by his count, to miss 15 hours of seminar in the space of a few weeks. He was unsuccessful in his efforts to catch up with Fall-Term coursework, thus setting up what he calls a “domino effect” that intruded on his Winter Term as well. He details other encroachments on his work, and his piece of mind as well: without a car he was hard-pressed to develop a routine for procuring kosher food in Ann Arbor; and again by his own account, he had to confront a set of emotional and psychological issues such as procrastination, for which he sought counseling in the Winter term. With his record for the first year so problematic, the interview was set up to give his case every opportunity to gain strength. This decision focused the Committee on two matters: (1) his submitted essay from last year and his present thinking about, and (2) his current statement of research plans. The essay, from [a particular professor's] course in textual theory, treated English and American editions of Harry Potter. Shmuel shows here a capacity to do intelligent, although not exhaustive, comparison, and he isolates a potentially interesting point in cultural translation by way of showing that some but not all images from everyday English common knowledge get changed in the process of marketing the novel in an American context. But the essay and our discussion of it left the Committee disappointed on matters of much import. Shmuel could not foresee thinking much more about textual theory [aside: this is the one thing they're entirely wrong about] nor did he demonstrate a feeling for the issues motivating such scholarship; he also had not thought at all about this text, aimed primarily at children and adolescents, in connection with the focus on childhood that he announces in his research statement. In that statement, he declares a concern to explore the cultural discourse surrounding the relation of childhood and eroticism, especially in terms of adolescence. His reasonable premise is that our culture perpetuates a “wildly contradictory” picture of these terms – he has in mind (it seems) such facts as the co-existence of statutory rape law and pop-culture’s sexualizing celebration of teen pop stars; or the irony that “the only way an adolescent can be legally recognized as an adult is by committing a capital offense.” A spirited but scattershot set of jabs at several loosely related topics, his statement cites no specific debates or texts apart from a recent New York Times headline employed as a lead in. When asked to dilate orally on his research plans, he was unable to specify what issues he attaches to his overall topic, what authorities or debates he means to reference, and what domains of scholarship (literature, linguistics, psychology, sociology, biology) he means principally to mine. When asked about several scholarly studies from the last two decades treating the social construction of childhood’s relation to eroticism, he was not familiar with the names of the works or authors. And perhaps simply from nervousness, he struggled unsuccessfully (with his interviewers) to recall the author or title of a recently controversial book in this terrain (probably Judith Levine’s Harmful To Minors [Minnesota], a genuinely relevant title). The interview left the Review Committee with a sense that his interests do not lie in research. In the judgment of the full Graduate Committee, Shmuel’s difficulties with attendance in the Winter term, and with meeting deadlines and fulfilling requests of faculty to meet with him then, cannot be adequately explained as the mechanical “domino effect” of a troubled first term. The recent interview, in turn, was largely organized around Shmuel’s present thinking and his picture of future work, neither of which reflect clear efforts in the direction of a unified research program. The issue, it should be made plain here, is not the presence or absence of a dissertation proposal, but the absence of a convincing picture of research concerns. Recognizing many genuine flashes of critical power in Shmuel, the Review Committee felt that he might find his niche as a cultural critic in more popular contexts, where the protocols of argument leave more room for his strengths to emerge. At a loss for any concrete evidence of appropriate commitment and capability on his part, however, the Graduate Committee has voted to discontinue Shmuel in the program.

7:03 PM:

It's not knowing that's the worst.

I wasn't so much bothered when it was a matter of waiting for them to meet and decide. But now the decision has been made. And I still don't know what that decision is. Unless somebody who was there decides to e-mail me about it (unlikely; if anybody was going to, they probably would have done so already), I'll find out tomorrow morning, I'm told, via a note in my mailbox on campus.

Of course, I suppose that finding out may turn out to be worse after all, but, even so, I wanna know.